[Shawn michael Lee]

Tim,

Reinstall did nothing. LSe card in PCI-express slot did nothing. All problems are still there.

But, I did learn something else just a moment ago. In the AJA plyback options, if I change the resolution from 720×480 to 720×486 (despite the fact that all of my footage is 720×480 DV or 8-bit AJA and my project is a 720×480 project) it actually works as well as if I turned the audio off. By that I mean that it stops, but jumps 2 frames everytime. That’s the best I can achieve.

I don’t know if you are working with SD or HD footage. But, maybe you can try this and let me know if it works. Unfortunately, the footage stretches a little and gets blurry on the desktop. Otherwise, I would just leave it like that.

[Shawn michael Lee]

“… Strangely, we can play/stop clips with audio in the source monitor fine. -It’s the timeline that is the problem”

Exactly the same problems here. In the source monitor it’s ok. On the timeline…bad.

I’m trying the LSe card today to see if it’s the PCI-X problem you mentioned. Also, Thad at AJA believes it could be a bad uninstall/reinstall. I may not have removed everything I needed on the upgrade. I hope to work with him today. I’ll let you know what works.

[Shawn michael Lee]

Tim,

It sounds like you and I have the same problem. It’s a problem that AJA is have trouble reproducing. It would help to know what it is that we have in common that may be causing this. I’d like to give you my specs and apps. Let me know if you have anything similar. There is a common link there somewhere, I think.

My setup:
HP desktop XW9300 with 2 dual core Opteron 270 chips (4 cores total)
4 GB RAM
Nvidia Quadro FX 3450
Two SATA 250GB media drive in RAID 0 configuration (40% free)
One 80GB System drive (36% free)
Creative Labs X-Fi sound card
XENA LS (NOT LSe) running ver.3.1 drivers
Quicktime 7.4 (the culprit in the past)
Adobe CS3 Production Premium, everything installed.
Adobe Audition 2.0
Adobe Acrobat 8.0
Adobe Lightroom 1.2
Panasonic’s P2 Card manager software (I installed this at the same time. Let me know if you have this installed as well)
Genarts Sapphire 1.x installed on After Effects only

See anything that stands out? Let me know. Thanks.

[Shawn michael Lee]

Very interesting. I’ve actually changed cards. Didn’t fix it. I went back to Premiere 2.0 and there were no problems. It’s a CS3 problem as far as I can tell. I’m working with the guys at AJA now. I’ll let you know what we find out.

[Shawn michael Lee]

Hi Simon,

Good Question. In CS3, it is in the Advanced tab when you begin a new project. In 2.0 it’s, Edit/Preferences/Encoding. In CS3 Dolby Digital is the default. In 2.0, PCM is the default.

You probably aren’t compromising too much in image quality unless you are really close to the limit of the disc. But for a comparison, a PCM/wav file is roughly 8x larger than a Dolby Digital/AC3 file. So a two hour piece that has a PCM file would require you to encode video at 3.46Mbps. This is below the recommended 4.0Mbps and will look terrible. On the flip side, a 2 hour piece with 2 channel, AC3 audio would encode the video at 4.75Mbps. Better, but not great. Even at 5.1 channel AC3, you could encode at 4.5 with no problems.

BTW: stay away from MPEG II encoding. I don’t know why they even include that option anymore. So buggy with settop players.

[Shawn michael Lee]

Not using Encore. That type of interactivity requires a third party program to be installed on the playback computer. You will find the most common program used, Intervideo, on some commercial DVD films. It allows you to access the multimedia features on your computer. It also lets you follow weblinks on menu pages. There is a seperate software out there that lets you author for Intervideo DVDs. I think Sonic did it as well.

But, as a rule, the DVD playback is simple without any third party software. That’s why Blu-ray/HD DVD is so different. It gives that interactivity back to the user.

[Shawn michael Lee]

Is it full screen video that you are exporting or an alpha channeled asset such as a lower third or graphic?

If it is full screen, I export with Best Setting (altered to Lower Fields), Quicktime (Animation codec, RGB only).
Or you could just use the Dynamic Link function. However, I’ve had random problems with reliability when using the DL.

[Shawn michael Lee]

For a 115 minute video with Dolby Digital 2.0 Audio, you would encode at 4.96 Mbps. This assumes a 1% overhead and NO MENUS. With Menus, this is less.

A 4.96Mbps video can look perfectly fine depending on the amount of motion in the video. If it’s just a talking head, interviews, static shots, by all means do it all on a single layer.

However, if you are looking at quick cuts, fast action, pans/zooms, dollys, lots of dissolves, etc., go with a dual layer and encode at 8.25Mbps.

Reminder: Do not use PCM audio. Use Dolby Digital 2.0. Huge size difference.

Hope that helps.

[Shawn michael Lee]

1) Do you have the latest drivers for your graphics card installed?
2) Do you have ALL available windows updates installed?
3) What is the source of your DV Files? are you capturing them via firewire? If so, could you attach a couple of tiny (only a few frames each) files to an email to support@aja.com so we can try to test them here?

AJA XENA Support

1)I have the same video drivers that were current as of Dec07. I don’t think that there has been an update since then.
2)All Windows updates are installed.
3)Some files are firewire. Some were SDI captured to DV25 Quicktime coded in Machina. I will send yo ua sample later today.

Thanks.

[Shawn michael Lee]

1)both. Creating a new project or opening an old one yields the same results.

2)Yes. To be sure, I captured new DV footage. Same problem. I capture 8-bit AJA avi, no problem.

3)My first project was with many DV clips. A later test project with only one or two clips produced the same results.

4)HP xw9300 Workstation with 2 dual core Opterons, Nvidia FX3450, Creative Xi-Fi, Xena LS, Adobe CS3 Production Premium, 4GB mem, 500GB RAID 0 drives.

Also of note: 1) I installed the P2 card manager for Panasonic DVCProHD at the same time. 2) If I remove/delete the audio from the DV files, the lag seems to disappear.

Thanks.